The Caravaggio Conspiracy (5 page)

‘You’re kidding me. And who do they imagine is going to take that on?’

‘I wish I knew. Whoever fills the bill. There’s no shortage of bigots in the Sacred College.’

‘I suppose. But what would they be looking for?’

‘For starters, a halt to immigration; the ruthless repatriation of “illegals”; a rejection of Muslim schools; the banning of the hijab and headscarves; basically, an end to any notion of equality or parity of esteem. Whatever it takes to underline that Europe is a Christian continent.’

‘Right. Well, I’m sorry to hear it, but not surprised.’

‘What do you mean?’

Dempsey ran a hand through his hair. ‘Face it, Uncle, after football and the economy, immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is the single-biggest talking point in Europe. There’s whole swathes of our major cities that have been taken over by new arrivals from North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey. We’ve had protests and counter-protests. And the legislation designed to protect us from terrorism has turned Europe into an armed camp. Not that it’s made us any safer. Only the other day there was that bomb at the Lateran Palace. Yesterday there was the business in Bologna. Muslims may feel the suspects were hard done by, but most Italians, I can tell you, are on the side of the judge.’

O’Malley shrugged. ‘Understandable, I suppose. It’d be hard not to
sympathize
with a man who’s been shot at just for trying to do his job.’

‘Exactly. But there’s a lot of hate out there – on both sides. The average European, having more or less given up on God, now finds himself facing growing demands from Islamists and Imams who seem to want to build a mosque in every high street and generally put the clock back four hundred years. If that’s progress, give me Karl Marx every time. The way I look at it, the history of Europe over that same period has been characterized, as much as anything, by our gradual giving up of religious obligation. No offence, but we’ve grown up. When I went to Sunday school, I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d be bored rigid. But for young Muslims, decades into the twenty-first century, Islam is everything. It’s what they live for. It’s what
defines
them.’

Now the priest raised a critical eyebrow. ‘You should be careful what you say, Liam. They’re not all suicide bombers. Most of them are good people, working hard to provide for their families. As to their devotion, maybe it’s the nature of the beast.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, you only have to contrast the clarity of the Qu’ran – inextricably linked to lifestyle and conquest – with the ad-hoc nature of Christian belief.’

Dempsey was immediately on his guard. He had no time for either side in this particular debate. The way he saw it, the two faiths were opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin. But there was an argumentative side to his nature and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a point. ‘What are you telling me? That the Qu’ran hasn’t changed for fifteen hundred years? You must be kidding.’

‘I’m serious,’ O’Malley replied, raising his voice against the noise of a Vespa scooter drifting up from the street below. ‘At least, not since the earliest times. Tradition has it that it was revealed to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel – Jibra’il in Arabic – who required him, over a period of twenty-two years, to learn it
sura
by
sura
, verse by verse, and to teach it to others by the same method.’

‘And I thought remembering my Catechism was hard.’

O’Malley ignored the crack. ‘Matter of fact, the word Qu’ran means “recital”. Only after Mohammad’s death in 632 were scribes recruited to take it down verbatim from the Prophet’s close companion and disciple, Zaid bin Thabit, who, like his master, had committed it to memory. Some years later, at the time of the third Caliph, Uthman bin Affan, war interrupted the process and different versions started to appear. When peace was restored, Uthman had all copies recalled and burned, to be replaced by a new, authorized version – essentially the one we have today.’

‘Not like the Bible, then,’ Dempsey said. ‘In scriptural terms, isn’t that a horse designed by a committee?’

O’Malley checked to see that the door to his office was shut. ‘If you mean it’s like a camel, they both came out of the desert and they’ve both been around a long time. But it’s a mess, no question about that. It wasn’t until the second century that St Irenaeus, a French bishop born in Anatolia, gathered the oral tradition and existing texts into a single construct.’

Dempsey could see what was coming. ‘Except that not all of his fellow scholars agreed …’

‘Too right, they didn’t. The “final” version turned out to be anything but and the process of selection continues to this day. There’s any number of books – the Gospel of Barnabas is a case in point – whose claim for inclusion in the Bible is not without foundation. Barnabas, you may recall, spent several years as right-hand man to St Paul during his missions to Asia Minor. He’s mentioned in Luke’s Gospel ahead of the Apostle. Well, according to Barnabas, not only was Judas crucified in Christ’s place, allowing Jesus to go straight to heaven, but a greater prophet, named in some translations as God’s Messenger, in others as Muhammad, would
eventually
emerge and bring the true faith to a waiting world.’

Dempsey sat up and stretched his shoulders. ‘So what do
you
think?’

O’Malley’s face gave nothing away. ‘There’s a verse in St John’s Gospel that speaks of a mysterious someone who in the future will hear the “spirit of truth” and speak what he has heard, showing us the shape of things to come. The Church has generally preferred to withhold comment on this – which is why you won’t hear it quoted from the pulpit.’

‘What’s the Muslim view?’

‘Oh, they’re all for Barnabas. No surprise there.’

‘But not the Vatican?’

‘Hardly. To Catholic theologians Barnabas offers a rope to hang fools and knaves. Never forget, Liam, the Catholic Church and Islam regard each other as inhabiting essentially the same universe. Each accuses the other of serious doctrinal error, but this doesn’t mean they don’t see aspects of the truth in each other’s beliefs. They’re like sibling rivals – they’re
connected
.’

‘Which brings us back to Muhammad. How do you rate him? If I remember rightly, Pope Benedict seemed to think he was steeped in violence.’

‘Oh he was, he was – even if that wasn’t quite the message His Holiness was trying to get across. But then so were many of the popes, some of whom wore armour and commanded their armies from the front. Urban II gave us the crusades. Julius II was almost welded to his warhorse. Gregory XVI suppressed insurrections in the papal states with unbelievable cruelty well into the 1840s. So if you’re talking Us and Them, it’s good to remember sometimes who “we” are and where we came from.’

‘But what about all those stories dad used to read me from the Bible when I was a kid? The miracles, the Virgin birth, the empty tomb? Were half of them made up? Is there any truth to any of it?’

O’Malley could sense the mischief in his nephew’s voice. He ran a finger round the inside of his Roman collar as if trying to free himself from its constraints. ‘Truth? T.S. Eliot was right when he said, “Oh do not ask, ‘What is it?’” We like to believe that faith is supported by scholarship and scholarship by faith. But the “facts” of almost any case can be disassembled and reconstructed to fit whatever seems most important to us at the time. In the end, we believe whatever makes us feel most comfortable.’

‘Which means that you believe Christ rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven …’

‘… “And sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Yes, Liam, I believe that. How could I not?’

Looking at his uncle, dressed in his cassock, with a silver cross around his neck, Dempsey wondered what his father would have made of all the questioning that fuelled theology at the higher level. Theirs was a house in which the Sacred Heart of Jesus glowed in the dark from its position on top of the mantlepiece. The first thing you saw when you walked in the front door was the Child of Prague – a statue of the infant Jesus, wearing a crown and golden robes. Not divine? Not risen from the dead? Dad would be spinning in his grave just at the thought of it.

A knock at the door interrupted his musings. It was Father Giovanni, holding a clipboard. ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten, Father General,’ he said, ‘but you have a busy schedule of appointments today, including lunch with the Spanish Provincial General and a three o’clock with the dean.’ He tapped the clipboard. ‘And I’ve got at least twenty letters here awaiting your signature.’

O’Malley toyed with a paper knife. ‘Okay, Giovanni, I’ll be five minutes.’

The priest withdrew reluctantly, giving Dempsey a dirty look.

‘Don’t mind Father Giovanni,’ O’Malley said, replacing the paper knife. ‘He’s the sort of young man, increasingly common in the order, who thinks the suffix SJ should be followed by MBA.’

‘I should go all the same. You’re obviously busy.’

‘And you’re due to have lunch with Fräulein Studer – more entertaining company, I should imagine, than the Spanish Provincial. But thanks for dropping in. I appreciate it. It’s not often these days that I get the chance to discuss religion.’

‘I won’t even comment on that,’ Dempsey said.

O’Malley stood up and walked round his desk to embrace his nephew. ‘Next time let’s meet over a pint.’

‘Good idea. Just give me a call.’

Dempsey turned to go. Just as he reached the door, his uncle called out to him: ‘Oh, and give my regards to Maya. Tell her it’s been a while since I saw her at Mass.’

As he walked down the four flights of stairs towards the front hall, past endless photographs and lithographs of leading Jesuits from the previous two hundred years, Dempsey felt the walls closing in on him. He had never had much time for organized religion. It was one thing to talk theology with his uncle, who had a knack of combining faith and scholarship. But these days he could no more
genuflect
in front of the altar than he could kiss a bishop’s ring. At the bottom of the stairs, he found himself confronted by a portrait of St Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, looking both ascetic and scheming, as if there were no lengths to which he wouldn’t go to promote the power and privilege of God. The eyes, he noted, did not follow him, the way they did in some paintings he had seen. Instead, they stared behind him, almost through him, towards some higher truth to which he would never be privy. He shivered and turned away. Outside, in the real world, the sun was shining.

Caravaggio had just drawn his shirt over his head – the same one he had worn for the past three days – when he heard his front door open and footsteps on the stairs. He groaned. His lodgings, on the Vicolo dei Santi Cecilia e Baggio, in the heart of the Artists’ Quarter, were an open house for rebels of all kinds. Painters and poets, out-of-work soldiers, pimps and whores, popped in and out just to pass the time of day or to catch up on the latest gossip. But this time it was his pupil and sometime manservant Bartolomeo Manfredi, who in return for lessons on the art and science of chiaroscuro ran errands for him and, when it suited him, prepared his meals.

‘Bad news, master!’ the Lombard called out, pushing open the door of the bedchamber without knocking. ‘
The Death of the Virgin
has been turned down. They say you used a whore as your model and have scandalized the Church.’

‘What?’

‘They say you used a whore …’

‘I heard you the first time, Bortolomeo. What do you mean, they
rejected
it?
Who
rejected it?’

Manfredi, a swarthy figure whose leg muscles showed through his tights, sniffed loudly. ‘The Discalced Carmelites.’

‘The Discalced Carmelites? What the fuck do they know about art? What do they know about anything, come to that? They’re a charitable order – when they’re not buggering young boys, that is.’

Manfredi picked up a camel-hair brush and tested the bristles between finger and thumb. ‘But it’s their church. And it’s their altar it’s supposed to hang in. Perhaps if you’d read Cherubini’s instructions …’

Caravaggio looked blank. Laerzio Cherubini, a morbidly pious lawyer, with close links to the Curia, was the one who had commissioned the painting, intended as an alterpiece for the newly completed church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere.

‘You must remember, Master. He wrote them out for you. Very explicit, as I recall – straight from the Council of Trent.’

The Council of Trent! Caravaggio was sick to the back teeth of hearing about the Council of Trent. It was like an albatross around the neck of thinking artists, laying out acceptable iconography and protocols while strangling genuine
creativity
. Caravaggio had flipped through Cherubini’s list and promptly stuck it under a candlestick, where it still lay.

By now, he had reached the stage of his toilette where he was rooting around for his shoes. He was down on his knees, extending his left hand beneath the bed as far as it would go. There was a lot of dust there, he soon discovered, and the remains of at least one dead mouse.

‘And I was supposed to tailor my vision according to his whims?’ he called out, mockingly. ‘Is that what what we’ve come to?’

‘I should have thought it was obvious. Cherubini’s one of the most devout bastards in Rome. Known for it. And he made it plain he wanted a Virgin he could live with, so to speak.’

‘Aaah! Gotcha!’ said Caravaggio, coming up triumphantly with the missing shoe and blowing off a thick film of dust. ‘So what is it about my Virgin that he can’t live with? – bearing in mind that I am your master and I
do
employ you.’

‘Simple. She’s a whore.
Zoccola
was the word I heard. Not only that, her legs and feet are bare. You’d never guess she was about to be raised up into heaven. Take one look at your Madonna and all you can say is, she’s dead, time to call in the mortician.’

‘But she
is
dead, Bortolomeo. That’s why it’s called
Death of the Virgin
.’

The manservant – he preferred to think of himself as an apprentice – was not to be moved. He had already placed the camel-hair brush in his pocket and was looking through a box of colours. ‘Yes, but in the contract you signed, “death” was intended to mean “dormition” or “transition”. The idea, as you must know, was that the Virgin would be seen on the cusp of her assumption. I don’t think she was meant to look as if she had just succumbed to the plague.’

Caravaggio pulled on his shoe, noting with dismay that his big toe peeked out the end. ‘Don’t be a cretin, Bortolomeo,’ he said. ‘You can search the Bible all you like and you won’t find any mention of the Assumption. I might as well do a painting of five hundred angels dancing on the head of a pin – come to think of it, that would probably sell. I asked a priest a couple of months back – a Jesuit, no less – where was the evidence that the Mother of God “transitioned” into heaven while half the characters in the New Testament looked on. And guess what?’ Manfredi shrugged. ‘He said there wasn’t any. There’s actually no mention of Mary after Pentecost. One minute the Church is telling us that the only biblical truths we can rely on are in the authorized version, the
Vulgate
, approved by the Pope, and the next they’re saying we should stick to myth when myth is better. Well, which is it?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Manfredi said. ‘Not my department. I just know which side of my bread soaks up the olive oil.’

But Caravaggio was not to be mollified. ‘I’ll tell you what else I bloody did. I went to see Cardinal Baronio. He’s as orthodox as they come. For Christ’s sake, he’s the one writing the official history of the Church. And
he
says the Madonna had a fully human nature and, of necessity, underwent the same experience of death as everybody else.’

‘Yes, Master, I don’t doubt it. But was she a whore?’

‘What’s that go to do with it?’

‘Well, it’s obvious who your model was.’

Caravaggio pulled a scrap of cheese from his beard and swallowed it. ‘Anna Bianchini is a very beautiful young woman.’

‘Very true. And she charges five scudi for a screw.’

‘So?’

‘So she’s a prostitute.’

‘When do we ever get to meet a woman who isn’t? Fathers protect their
daughters
’ virginity like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell.’

‘Yes … but that’s not the point, is it?’

‘It’s the truth. Come to that, I used Fillide Melandroni as Saint Catherine for Cardinal Del Monte. And she’s a whore … mind you, Del Monte would rather she’d been a boy. I used Fillide again as Mary of Cleophas in the
Deposition of Christ
. You remember that? Everyone from the Pope down described it as a masterpiece. So what is it they want from me? ’Cos I’m fucked if I know.’

Manfredi crossed the room to a small table and poured some water from a jug into a shallow basin. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘But if you’re thinking of arguing the toss with Cherubini, I’d freshen up first. You know what a stickler he is for
cleanliness
. Next to godliness, he says.’

‘Like a fucking Lutheran.’

Manfredi snorted. ‘Just make sure you don’t tell him that.’

Twenty minutes later, after rinsing his face and hands and dragging a comb through his hair, Caravaggio set out for the Palazzo Cherubini on the Via di Giustiniani. His own lodgings were cramped and dark, but he had no need of light. Soon, though, as he turned the corner onto the Via della Scrofa, he could feel the world open up and the sun bore down on him from a sky the colour of stem irises. There were a lot of pilgrims out today – many of them from Genoa, by the sound of them. Must be a feast day or something. But then, when wasn’t it? Head down, he raced past the church of Sant’Agostino, averting his gaze from a group of whores on their way into Mass, led by the haughty figure of Fillide Melandroni, who, he remembered, had recently got herself arrested after cutting the face of one of her rivals. Someone else he avoided was the barber, Lucca, who called out to him from the doorway of his shop, snipping in the air with an outsized pair of shears.

‘Master Caravaggio! Long time no see. Just five minutes in my chair and you’d be a new man.’

‘Some other time, Lucca!’

He almost stopped at a colour seller’s next to the Albergo della Scrofa. He could do with some more reds. He’d rather taken a fancy to red of late and wanted to expand his range. Problem was, he owed him money – quite a lot of money, as a matter of fact. Then he heard a clock strike in the Piazza Navona and hurried on, stepping over a pile of ordure recently arrived, from the smell of it, from a window overhead.

The cobbles outside the larger houses were slick with shit and piss, except for a path outside each front door. Where did it all go? he wondered. Couldn’t be healthy. In classical times, they had drains. Not any more. If someone could come up with a proper sewage system, some wag had written, they’d clean up. Too true! By now he’d reached the church of San Luigi dei Francesi – the French church. He paused for a second, debating whether or not to go in. The church, run by a group of canons acting for the French ambassador to the Holy See, had recently installed the last of three of his paintings in the church’s Cantarelli chapel, depicting key moments in the life of St Matthew, and he wanted to check they’d got the lighting right. But there wasn’t time. After he’d settled with Cherubini, he was due to meet his friends, Onorio and Prospero, at the Turk’s Head. They’d drink some wine, set the world to rights, then slip off and play a game of racquetball or maybe just pass the time in the brothel. It depended. Either way, it would beat half an hour of pietistic talk with the priests of San Luigi. Previously, he had only dabbled in
religious
art as a kind of sideline, to give him respectability and up his fees. Rome was, after all, the centre of the Christian world. Now he knew why. His three renderings of the Apostle had taken him an age to complete – when he was working on them, that is, for he had other customers as well, looking for their card-players, or baskets of fruit or lewd depictions of boys and young men. ‘The dirtier, the better,’ one banker had said, commissioning a study of Bacchus. ‘Only don’t make him too well hung – wouldn’t want to give the wife ideas.’ As if they didn’t have ideas already! God preserve him from half-wits. One thing about ordinary people, though: they tended not to quibble. Very respectful, most of them. Not like the French bloody canons! They’d rejected his first version of St Matthew and the Angel, and if it hadn’t been for the banker Vicenzo Giustiniani, who snapped it up without batting an eyelid, then paid for its replacement, he would have been seriously out of pocket. According to the canons, the original was irreverent and ignoble. They didn’t like it that he had shown the saint with his bare legs and feet sticking out. A more ‘magisterial’ rendition was what they required, with Matthew robed as a senator, busy with his Gospel, his legs and feet lost in shadow. What was it about bare feet anyway? Did they think the Apostles didn’t have feet – or legs for that matter? Did they imagine they floated along, trailing decorous robes, never making actual contact with the ground? In the old days, he could paint what he liked and how he liked. But that was when he was new to Rome and worked without commissions. Now that he was ‘celebrated’, all such freedom was lost. Christ! Here he was, on his way to plead with Laerzio Cherubini, one of the most infuriating men in Rome, so hypocritical he’d come to believe his own lies. Onorio said he’d been born with a poker up his arse – and he wasn’t far wrong. It was just as well they both spoke Italian, for other than that they had no language in common.

Not far now. Which was just as well, for he was breaking into another of his sweats. Weaving in and out of the pilgrims and beggars and street traders and lines of nuns, he ignored the beckoning fingers of an ageing and decidedly ugly whore (while noting to himself that she might do for a St Anne he had in mind). He also put some distance between himself and Paolo Leone, his wine merchant, who called out to him, in the name of God and all his blessed saints, to settle his bloody bill. ‘Yes, yes, Paolo, this afternoon for sure! Don’t worry about it.’

Another he avoided on his journey was Ranuccio Tomassoni, whose family controlled the Campo Marzio. Ranuccio was a young
bravo
in search of a big
reputation
. He liked to take on Caravaggio at cards or racquetball, at which he hardly ever won, and failing that would outbid him in the brothel, using family money. If he’d had the time, he’d have given him a clip around the ear – or maybe run him through. But he was in a hurry.

And then, all at once, he had arrived. The Palazzo Cherubini, four storeys high, pink as a cherub’s arse, was new and still smelled of wet plaster. Its owner, once a common soldier, grown rich as a Church litigant, was impossibly tall, with a hook nose and bushy eyebrows. Why he hadn’t opted for a career in the Church was a mystery. In a city in which religious devotion was measured by the
hundred-weight
, Cherubini attended Mass every day of his life, twice on Sundays, and, when he wasn’t defrauding his clients, could usually be found in an attitude of prayer. Cynics pointed out that he had tried to shorten his time in Purgatory by forcing most of his children to join religious orders, which was probably true. Caravaggio didn’t give a toss either way.

He banged on the large, double-fronted door, embossed with the owner’s newly acquired coat of arms, which looked like three funeral urns against a sea of troubles. Eventually, a wizened maidservant drew back the bolt and peered out, suspiciously. With her warty nose and blackened teeth, she looked like she belonged in a portrait he’d once seen by Ghirlandaio.

‘Oh,’ she said, sensing trouble. ‘Master Caravaggio – it’s you.’

‘Is your master in?’

‘He’s busy.’

‘Don’t give me that.’

‘He’s talking to a bishop.’

‘All the better, then.’ And with that he pushed his way past the startled woman, who waddled after him flapping her arms, and strode straight into the main
reception
room at the end of the corridor.

Cherubini, wearing a burgundy-coloured doublet and hose, with a
preposterous
fur-lined hat on his head and two sticks for legs, was examining a technical drawing of a proposed addition to Santa Maria della Scala laid out for his approval on a brightly polished table. Next to him stood a short, fat bishop, as bald as a tennis ball, who looked as if he was no stranger to a good table.